Photo Galleries

Overview

The Internet provides a convenient option for people to share life events with friends and relatives. Online photo galleries allow people to share photographs for both personal and business purposes. You can use photo galleries to showcase your products or to share your family albums.

There are many options available for people interested in launching an online photo gallery. You can integrate your photo gallery with your website at your domain. If you have a business or a professional gallery, you should consider this option to make sure that your website is streamlined, professional, and uniform. If you lack the technical skills to create a professional website, you may want to consult a guide or hire a web developer. You can find free photo galleries, or you can pay for a template that ranges from $300 to $500.

If you do not need a website photo gallery, you may want to consider services like Snapfish or Kodak Gallery. You can share your albums with other users, and you can order prints, mugs, cards, key chains, and posters of your photos. Social networking tools including Facebook and MySpace offer online photo galleries that allow you to tag photos and write captions.

Benefits

A photo gallery allows you to upload, manage, store, and distribute your digital photos. You can even free up some space on your computer by saving your files online. Galleries store photos and display previews with a thumbnail image. When you click on the thumbnail, you can view the larger version of the picture. Galleries create thumbnails automatically in order to ensure that viewers can easily navigate your page. Viewers may not want to see all of your folders, and with thumbnails, they can easily select which ones they want to see. You can also create photo portals, family album websites, and private galleries. You can also include a section for customers to upload photos and to add comments.

How It Works

Tech savvy users can install galleries that are based on the hypertext preprocessor (PHP) scripting language. First, create a simple PHP file that checks all files in a given directory. After a thumbnail view is created for all the photos, a script displays the thumbnails in a table as a link to the original size image. This is done through a thumbnail generator. The thumbnail files will include a "_th.jpg". The PHP limits the execution time and maximum memory usage. A default memory is allowed a script of 8 MB, but if you can add 64 MB. You can arrange photos in a table to make your formatting more appealing. The last task is to create a HTML block that is used to add a title and to create the corresponding table code.

Creating your own photo gallery can be time consuming. You can also opt to sign up for an account at a service. With this option, you will register for an account and be able to upload photos to share within minutes.

Companies/Brands

Flickr, Smugmug, ImageShack, PhotoArt Gallery, and Photo.net are companies that provide online photo galleries. Lightbox Photo and Gallery are PHP tools that you can integrate with your website.